As is known in the art, certain munitions can be guided in flight. Excalibur and Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM) are examples of munitions that can be redirected in flight. As will be readily appreciated, there are several advantages to firing munitions with this capability. For example, since the munitions do not follow a passive ballistic trajectory, it is not possible for an enemy to determine the position of the launching tube from radar measurements of the munition in flight. In addition, targets at different ranges and azimuths can be engaged without re-positioning the launching tube so as to increase the rate of fire. Further, targets that cannot be engaged with a passive ballistic trajectory due to terrain shadowing can be engaged with maneuverable munitions. Also, munitions in flight can be regarded as fire assets that can be re-directed to destroy high value pop-up targets.
While guided munitions can be quite effective, there are challenges in efficiently generating path planning options for inflight munitions. As is known in the art, path planning under kinematic constraints has been a topic of research in the robotics community. Many of the results obtained for the so-called Dubins car can be applied to loitering weapons, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, there has been little progress in path planning for global positioning satellite (GPS) guided indirect fire weapons, e.g., Excalibur, ERGM, and the NLOS PAM. This class of indirect fire weapons has limited maneuver capability and difficult kinematic constraints compared to loitering weapons.